Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [18]
The arrest appears to have deepened Clyde’s sense of persecution and victimization. Crime was the only avenue open to him, he rationalized; police had given him no choice. He and several partners returned to burglarizing stores. As she did throughout Clyde’s career, Bonnie took no part in these crimes, though occasionally she sat in the getaway car. On one such excursion in the town of Kaufman, Texas, Clyde was surprised by a night watchman and forced to flee; when their getaway car stalled on a muddy road, he and Bonnie stole a mule and set off cross-country. Cornered by a posse the next morning, Bonnie was arrested. Clyde got away. Bonnie languished in jail for three months before being released in July 1932. Clyde’s crimes grew more violent in her absence. He murdered a storekeeper in Hillsboro, Texas, and, after Bonnie was freed, killed a sheriff in Oklahoma.
The moment Bonnie and Clyde became “Bonnie and Clyde” came on a Saturday evening, August 6, 1932, when Clyde’s partner, Raymond Hamilton, spirited Bonnie away from her mother’s side to Clyde’s side, where she remained for the rest of her life. The couple commenced a routine they would follow for two years, disappearing for a few weeks, sometimes months, then slipping back to Dallas for clandestine family reunions. These rendezvous, at out-of-the-way roadsides near Dallas, followed a pattern. Clyde and Bonnie announced their return by tossing a bottle onto a family member’s porch, sometimes with a note inside. Word passed among family members in code; for the Barrows, the mention of “cooking red beans” meant a meeting was at hand. The families drove to the meeting point at dusk, spread blankets on the grass, and listened as Bonnie and Clyde rambled on about their latest adventures.
Their wanderings had no aim or focus. Clyde simply drove from state to state, robbing a gas station or drugstore or sometimes a bank when they ran low on cash. It makes their story a jerky, alinear narrative, a string of scattered episodes with no discernible arc. But that’s the way they lived, ricocheting across an area loosely defined by Minnesota, Mississippi, Colorado, and New Mexico, rarely staying in one place long. Unlike Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, Clyde and Bonnie made no effort to establish a permanent base until the last weeks of their lives; for months the closest they came to a home was an abandoned barn outside the Dallas suburb of Grand Prairie. As their notoriety grew, they would resort to living out of their car, which was littered with guns, license plates, and food wrappers. They gave up bathing and normal hygiene. Their clothes were dirty. They smelled.
Clyde clearly aspired to be a bank robber, but his first attempts were humiliating. On November 30, 1932, he and a partner entered the bank at Orinogo, Missouri, north of Joplin. A gunfight ensued, during which Clyde’s partner managed to scoop up some loose bills. He and Clyde scrambled to the getaway car and avoided a desultory pursuit. The take came to $80.b All that winter Bonnie and Clyde continued their murderous travels, killing a man in Temple, Texas, who tried to stop them from stealing his car on Christmas Day, murdering a Dallas detective who surprised Clyde one night in the Bog, taking a motorcycle cop hostage in Springfield, Missouri, when he stopped Clyde for speeding. Their notoriety, however, was limited to Dallas, where their crimes were front-page news. Outside Texas they remained all but unknown.
In March 1933 Clyde’s brother Buck was paroled from prison and, accompanied by Buck’s wife, Blanche, the brothers reunited in Joplin, where they rented a garage apartment and set to burglarizing jewelry stores. On April 13 a group of Joplin lawmen arrived at the apartment, responding to a call from a suspicious neighbor. Clyde and Buck